FWN/Beats/AskFedora

Ask Fedora

In this section, we answer general questions from Fedora community. Send your questions to askfedora AT fedoraproject.org and Fedora News Team will bring you answers from the Fedora Developers and Contributors to selected number of questions every week as part of our weekly news report. Please indicate if you do not wish your name and/or email address to be published.

What is the official Fedora policy on Mono?

Arthur Pemberton asked: "Fedora traditionally holds fairly strict guidelines for inclusion of software, and the pursuit of Free Software. As such I consider their decisions on such things to be quite important. With that in mind, I would like to ask: what is the official Fedora policy on Mono? Specifically in terms to its FOSS nature and legality."

Paul W Frields, Fedora Project Leader responds:

Until certain ambiguities such as those concerning Mono's patent licensing and redistribution are resolved, there is no formal policy
that I'm aware of. We have concerns which are being researched, and any official policy would likely come through Fedora Legal and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. The substitution of Gnote for Tomboy on the Desktop Live image and in the default installation for Fedora 12 reduces package load in the standard Fedora Desktop Live image, but for now Mono remains in the Fedora repositories.